Not Red Pill in Fiction: The Dirty Girls Social Club

The Dirty Girls Social Club, by Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, published in 2003. Fair warning: This is mostly just me venting at the identity politics bait-and-switch that is this “novel.”

Aw, man, I had such high hopes for this one based on the first few pages. Classic female chunks of cheese all over the place (details to follow). Then the estrogen-infused cheese disappears. Worse, it becomes a politically correct race-sex-LBGTQ tract. With no plot, not even a pretend plot. Not even a gesture in the direction of faking an interest in thinking about the possibility of coming up with a plot. Sigh. Well, at least I got this for just 50 cents at a local library book sale. If I’d paid full price for this I’d be pissed. I mean, the title, “The Dirty Girls Social Club,” come on! That’s purposefully designed to trick 25-year-old chicks into buying it, expecting a lot of graphic sex, just so they can be conned into reading the author’s political complaints.

And it started so promisingly! Here’s what I’d written when I was a few pages in:

A “novel” about six “Latina” chicks living in Boston. They call themselves “sucias,” which we’re told means “dirty girls.” Each chapter is narrated by a different chick. At least judging by the first chapter there’s a lot of PC whining about being Hispanic in the US, which I am mostly going to try to ignore. But some of it is bound up with the author’s standard-mold female drama queenery, attention-whoring, and humble-bragging, so it’s impossible to avoid all of it. I hope that later chapters, narrated by other characters, will dial this the fuck down or it’s going to get really old really fast.

(Boy, was that hope dashed.)

But judging from the first 3 pages, this is going to be great as far as the female psychology stuff goes. The narrator of the first chapter is one Lauren Fernandez. In a horribly violent act of cultural genocide, I am omitting the accent mark over that last letter a. (I’m tempted to include an umlaut over one of the consonants, like Spinal Tap.) She bemoans her excessively dramatic life in classic female drama queen fashion – in particular the fact that her boyfriend is cheating on her – does a humblebrag about a guy at the bar checking her out even though she describes herself as “gross,” and obsesses about her fingernails and her variable clothing sizes, thus confirming that if men portrayed women as being half as obsessed with clothing and personal grooming as they actually are, feminists would go into tachycardia. She then returns to the fact that the men in her life all cheat on her. Complete with the standard excuse-making and denial of responsibility: “I don’t pick them, exactly. They find me, with that whacked radar…” All this within the first two pages! You can see why I had high hopes for this one.

She’s a reporter, because of course she is. It had to be either that or lawyer. Assuming that another one of the “dirty girls” is a lawyer, what do the other four do? Can’t wait to find out! My guess as of page 5: One of them does something in education, one works for a charity, and one has some sort of “high-pressure” corporate job. That leaves one for government, maybe “social work” of some kind. LATER: Not one but two “journalists”! And one professional musician: how could I have forgotten “rock star”?

P.6: More PC whining about how hard it is being a non-white chick. Complains that when she doesn’t do her job, a white man dares to note that fact:

“I’m always early. It’s the reporter training—come late, lose the story. Lose the story, risk having some envious and mediocre white guy in the newsroom accuse you of not deserving your job.” Can you believe that? Some white guy might say I don’t deserve my job just because I didn’t do my job! The nerve! I’m a non-white woman! I deserve to keep my job even if I don’t do it! Grr. Talk about entitlement mentality! I’m noting this because it’s relevant on the very next page, so put it in your short term memory.

P. 7: In case you didn’t get the drama queenery a couple of pages ago: “Men like Ed [her boyfriend] find me, because they smell the hidden truth of Lauren on the wind: I hate myself because no one else has ever bothered to love me.” Leaping cats! How do people who are so un-serious take themselves so seriously? You can practically see her striking a pose. The back of one hand presses against her forehead as she slumps to the ground in a faint. From all the drama! Of being forced to date jerks!

Still p. 7: More self-obsessed PC whining: “First week on the job an editor strolled past my desk and said in the deliberate, too-loud English they would all come to use on me, ‘I’m so glad you’re here representing your people.’” No whiteys talk like this to Hispanics, at least not that I’ve ever heard. The other two options are to say “I’m not glad you’re here,” in which case she’d complain about the hostility, or to say nothing, in which case she’d complain about being “culturally erased” or something.

Still p. 7: Check this out: Our Narratrix wants another beer, and is peeved that the waitress is distracted by the bar’s TV: “Como? she asks, looking confused. She was watching a Mexican soap opera on a small TV behind the counter and looks annoyed to be bothered with, you know, work.” Jesus, bitch, it was just at the top of the previous page that you complained about being expected to do your job!

P.9: attention whore ultra-fantasy. Our Narratrix is a reporter, as I may have mentioned once or twice. The paper she works for, The Gazette, has recently, well, read:

“It’s getting a little harder to take public transit because the Gazette recently put up billboards all over town with my huge red-brown curly hair and grinning freckled face on them, accompanied by the idiotic words ‘Lauren Fernandez: Her Casa Is Your Casa, Boston.’”

This chick—I mean the author, Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez— is 200-proof female psychology. You can sense her having some sort of attention-whoregasm as she fantasizes about having her face on billboards all over a major city.

Why the billboard thing targeted to Hispanics? Because…

“Money talks, see. Hispanics are no longer seen as a foreign unwashed menace taking over the public schools with that dirty little language of theirs; we are a domestic market.”

What you mean “we,” hon? On several previous pages you mentioned that you don’t speak Spanish, and acted all aggrieved that whiteys might assume that you did just because you’re, you know… Hispanic. (She actually calls that assumption “illogical.”) Now in the context of the Spanish language you’re suddenly using the word “we.”

Seriously, from page 7:

“Here’s how my job interview went: You’re a Latina? How… neat. You must speak Spanish, then? When you’ve got $15.32 in your bank account… what do you say to a question like that, even when the answer is no? …With a name like Lauren Fernandez, they figured Spanish was part of the package. But that’s the American disease as I see it: rampant, illogical stereotyping.” (If you hate it so much here, you are quite welcome to leave.) And page 8: “But what I thought was: Just hire me. I’ll learn Spanish later.”

Having explicitly stated that she doesn’t speak Spanish, and called anyone who assumes she does a bigot, she then says, “Hispanics are no longer seen as a foreign unwashed menace… with that dirty little language of theirs; we are a domestic market.” We?

Let’s skip ahead 100 pages to page 105: Her boss Chuck, a ridiculous dorky white man – of course – can’t speak Spanish. While she doesn’t actually say “I’m aggrieved by this!” it’s a strong subtext:

“It wasn’t until [blah blah] that Chuck figured out who Ricky Martin was. Now he goes around, years too late, singing “Livin’ la Vida Loca,” only he can’t say vida and he can’t say loca, so he ends up singing ‘Livin’ Evita Loqua.’”

He can’t pronounce words in Spanish – a language which I don’t speak either. But I’m going to act aggrieved anyway. It’s so culturally insennnnnnsitive! How DARE you not speak a language which I also don’t speak?! You fucking American bigot!

I remember when Livin’ la Vida Loca was a hit. I never encountered a whitey who couldn’t say it. “Vida” and “loca” are easy words to say. She couldn’t even be bothered to come up with a word that contains, for example, the letter ñ (say “enye”), which is not pronounced like n, and which a non-Spanish speaker might actually be confused about. For someone who writes so voluminously – you should read the 100 pages of pointless filler I skipped over – she sure is a lazy writer. How hard would it have been to make up such an example?

Enraging though all this is, it’s a great example of the sheer illogicality of leftism and female-think. And when you combine leftism and female-think, WOW. First she whines that she’s expected to do her job (how unfair!). Then whines that the waitress isn’t doing her job. Then she denies speaking Spanish, then acts personally aggrieved that some whiteys might have a low opinion of Spanish. Jeez. The sheer lack of any consistency, or any concern for consistency, really is shocking. Yeah, I know I shouldn’t be shocked. I’ve been studying leftists, and women, for decades. Yet the Satan-level hypocrisy and double standards make steam come out of my ears.

A Net search reveals that the author of this identity-politics Communist Manifesto got a job at the Los Angeles Times after this novel was published. (The double-journalist set of characters was obviously an author-insert fantasy.) Anyway, she ended up quitting her job at the L.A. Times, accusing that paper of… can you guess? I bet you can! … racism and sexism! Surprise!

In what other country in the world would people put up with this crap? If you went to China, got a cushy “job” as a “reporter” and then quit with complaints that the newspaper was full of Chinese people, I’m pretty sure they’d “invite” you to leave the country. Only in the white world do we let people come to our countries and abuse us this way. The situation cannot last.

Back to it. P. 102: a diatribe against a right-wing journalist lying. Unreal. Who lies more, right-wing journalists or left-wing journalists? On the same page, a diatribe against a right-wing political group throwing Molotov cocktails. Bitch, please! Who throws more Molotov cocktails, right-wingers or left-wingers? It really is true that leftists always project.

Also on page 102: She recalls that when she started working at the newspaper, an old hand gave her three pieces of advice, Blah, Blah-blah, and “Three, don’t wear your skirts so short ’cuz you’re makin’ me sweat.” You wish, honey.

P. 103: Back near the start of the book, the Narratrix had recalled a scene in which a college professor was so scared of having several hispanic women in the class that he was literally trembling. (WTF?) on p. 103 we get more surreal fantasizing that white people find her scary because she’s hispanic: “I love my desk. I have draped it in Mexican rugs and Santeria beads just to scare everyone.” Then, in the same paragraph, some whining about her boss sending her out to cover a story and adding, “Bring me back some biscotti, almond.” Ah, yes, I always order people I’m scared of to run errands for me.

P. 103-4: Complaining about how her boss sent her on a job to cover some Mexican laborers. How dare he assume that I’m Mexican, just because I’m hispanic! MAYBE THAT HAS SOMETHING TO DO WITH THE FACT THAT YOU DRAPED MEXICAN RUGS ALL OVER YOUR DESK, YOU FUCKING CUNT.

Alright, I’m done. Pretty sure this book doesn’t contain any fun “dirty girl” stuff, now that I’m more than 100 pages into it. Given that nothing prefigured by the title actually appears in the novel, as far as I can tell, I infer that the title was purely chosen to trick people into reading the identity politics screeching.

SJW Attack on a Black Female Author of Gay Porn

If you think your demographic characteristics or your “Love wins” bumper sticker make you safe, you are dangerously out of contact with current reality.

Another day, another surreal accusation of hateful statements against…Gypsies?

(Via.)

The author, Stephanie Burke, is a long-time attendee and panelist at Fantasy/SciFi conventions like the one in Baltimore, Balticon. At the latest Balticon she was falsely accused of various statements of the type that that politically correct people like to screech about. I say she was falsely accused because the recording of one panel she spoke at turned up nothing “offensive,” a witness at another panel recalled nothing “offensive,” and when she requested to know the evidence against her, the accuser laughed in her face.

After being falsely and frivolously accused of making objectionable statements, she was roughly and loudly removed from yet another panel where she was scheduled to speak, in view of many audience members. Burke generally had her name dragged through the mud with bizarre accusations about insulting Gypsies and transgenders, the latter being particularly weird since she says she has a “transgendered daughter” herself.

Burke is a black woman with a transgendered child and she has written a book of gay porn gay romance. Here’s the link at Amazon (where it’s categorized as “Fantasy” for some reason). She also claims to have neurological issues, so she could play the “ablest” card.

None of this protected her.

In case you’re a leftist who is just starting to explore “right-wing” thought, or who wound up here by accident, this is why we have sayings like “The Left always eats its own,” “The Revolution devours its children,” etc. That last saying came from Jacques Mallet du Pan’s observations on the French Revolution in response to events like Robespierre being executed without trial by his fellow leftist revolutionaries, shortly after he recommended that… “counterrevolutionaries” be executed without trial. LOL. And remember how Trotsky died. These sayings exist because they’re true.

I imagine Stephanie Burke thought herself absolutely bulletproof: She’s a female, black, gay-porn writing, mother of a transgender, with neurological issues. Yet all that amounted to nothing. She might as well have been a straight white man in a MAGA hat.

Each individual leftist always has a bizarre fantasy that the revolution will stop precisely where he wants it to stop. Of course this is ridiculous. Leftism is a machine and once you’ve started it rolling downhill you cannot stop it where you please. Yes, this applies to you.

Or, to switch metaphors:

It’s easy to invite a vampire into your house, but getting it to leave again is another matter.

Inflation and all that

Note January 24, 2024: Hi; I’ve been getting a lot of hits to this post lately but can’t track them back. If you got here from a link and don’t mind telling me what it is, could you do so in the comments? Just curious. Thanks, Neurotoxin.

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Hey everybody, inflation’s back in the headlines! Suffering from social embarrassment because you can’t follow discussions of economic policy? Lonely because that cute guy you like only dates girls who understand the Taylor Principle? Have you been bullied because you confused the Fed and the Treasury? We’re here to help! Here’s a primer on US monetary policy and related matters.

Executive summary: Inflation is a rise in the general level of prices of goods and services. In the long run inflation is caused by increasing the amount of money in circulation.

1. The Federal Reserve System. The USA’s central bank. A central bank is not actually a bank. It’s the part of the government that prints the money.

(The issuers of various kinds of US money are the Federal Reserve System, the Treasury, and the Mint, jointly. But the first of these is the institution that handles monetary policy; see below.)

Everyone calls the Federal Reserve System “the Fed.” The Fed was legislated into existence in 1913. Aside from controlling influencing the supply of money, it has the power to create regulations that affect broad swathes of the financial sector (particularly banks), and to “interpret” regulations created by Congress and the President.

2. “Dollars.” The two most liquid forms of dollar-denominated assets are literal paper dollars and dollar-denominated electronic reserves. Electronic reserves are simply numbers in a Fed computer. Those numbers are assets of commercial banks (i.e. actual banks) and similar financial institutions. Banks can have reserve accounts at the Fed. You and I can’t.

Electronic reserves are money for two reasons: One reason is that everyone accepts them as money, i.e. as media of exchange. You go to the sex store and buy a 5-gallon barrel of lube, a 7-speed vibrator, and a pair of crotchless panties for $100. You swipe your card through the reader and payment has been made.

(This process decreases the balance in your checking account by $100 and adds $100 to the sex store’s account at its bank (or similar financial institution). The two banks talk to each other, via the Fed, which debits your bank’s reserve account by $100 and credits the sex store’s bank’s account by $100. BTW, the process is not actually as instantaneous as it seems. Also, it’s not always mediated by the Fed, which subcontracts out some of this payments-clearing stuff.)

The second reason that electronic reserves are money is that if a bank requests it, the Fed will ship paper money against their electronic reserves at one-for-one. E.g. the Fed will lower the bank’s electronic reserve account number by $50 million and ship it $50 million in paper dollars in an armored truck.

While I’m on the subject: take out a dollar bill and note the “legal tender” language. This is what people mean when they call dollars “fiat money”: another reason they’re money is legal fiat. See below for more.

3. Treasury securities (bills, notes, and bonds). Yes, this is relevant for monetary policy; bear with me. These are basically IOUs the Treasury sells when the federal government needs to borrow money. The buyers of these securities are lending money to the federal government. The simplest version of this is a piece of paper which— well, they’re not generally paper any more, but anyway— a piece of paper that works like this: A 6-month Treasury note, which the Treasury sells on June 1, 2022, says

“The US Treasury will pay the holder of this piece of paper $1,000 on December 1, 2022.”

On June 1, 2022, someone buys that note for some amount smaller than its face value of $1,000. (The price the Treasury can get for it is determined by conditions in financial markets.) That allows the buyer to earn interest. For example, say you buy it for $990 on 6/1/22. Then on 12/1/22 when the Treasury gives you $1,000, you have gotten back the $990 you lent to the government plus $10 of interest. So you’ve earned a six-month interest rate of $10/$990, or about 1%. (Note this is not the implied yearly interest rate.)

So the note earns interest because it sells at a discount from its face value. So this is called a discount bond. Since it makes no “coupon” payments before its maturity it’s also called a no-coupon bond. Coupon bonds make a sequence of payments, at least one coupon payment before their final payment.

State and local government bonds and corporate bonds work the same way, terms of their basics, as Treasury bonds.

4. Why do some people say that (a lot of) modern money is “debt”? First note that money is anything that is generally accepted in exchange for goods and services. (“Money” is defined by a list of several features, but that’s the headliner.) If I can go into a sex store and walk out with a 5-gallon drum of lube, by swiping a card that’s connected to my checking account, then the number in my checking account is money.

Thus, impeccably conventional measures of the money supply include numbers in checking accounts. (The way the law usually works— things are different at the moment due to COVID— is that for every $1 in electronic reserves that a bank has, it’s allowed to have up to $10 in checking accounts on its books.) Notice something: While the number in your checking account is an asset from your point of view, it’s a liability from the bank’s point of view. Why? Because they have to surrender that money if you direct them to. They have to either give you paper dollars or they have to make payment to a third party (the sex store, e.g.) when you swipe your card or write a check.

So a lot of modern money is something that appears on the liability side of some financial institution’s balance sheet. Thus, debt.

5. Monetary policy. The changing of the money supply to achieve certain economic goals, one part of economic policy. There is more than one kind of monetary policy, especially in, say, a pandemic in which the Fed is crazily improvising, but normally the main one is a simple thing with a complicated name: open market operations (OMO).

OMO is simply the Fed buying and selling Treasury securities.

When the Fed wants to raise the money supply by say $10 billion, it simply buys $10 billion of Treasury bonds (bills, or notes, whatevs). It credits the bond sellers’ accounts (or their banks’ accounts) with $10 billion of reserves. Where do those reserves come from? The Fed just types them up. People at the Fed raise the number in the reserve accounts in the Fed’s computers.

So the Fed has removed $10 billion of T-bonds from the economy and injected $10 billion of money. This increases the supply of money, colloquially “printing money.”

If the Fed wants to decrease the money supply it sells bonds. The Fed gives (say) $10 billion of T-bonds to various bond buyers, and they make payment by giving the Fed $10 billion of reserves. Then the Fed destroys those reserves. How? It just lowers the number in the relevant reserve account. Where does that money go? Like love in that old J. Geils Band song, it’s gone, that’s all.

6. Inflation. Inflation is a rise in the general level of prices of goods and services. In the long run, inflation is caused by money creation.

Everyone in the world who is knowledgeable about this topic knows how to stop inflation: Stop printing money. This might not happen for two possible reasons. One reason is that the central bank believes (rightly or wrongly) that the economic costs of stopping the inflation would be worse than the inflation. The other is political stuff. E.g. maybe the government’s executive branch is (for various reasons) pressuring the central bank to continue the money printing.

7. Interest rates. What’s all this talk about interest rates in monetary policy? While monetary policy is (by definition) the changing of the amount of money in circulation, most central banks usually think about policy through an interest rate channel. That is, the supply of money affects interest rates— take this on faith please; this post is already longer than I planned— and interest rates affect other stuff that we actually care about, like GDP, the unemployment rate, etc.

When you contract the money supply you stop and indeed reverse inflation. You also (in the short run) cause interest rates to go up (take on faith). So people say things like “We need to raise interest rates to stop inflation.” I think this is an unfortunately roundabout way of expressing it.

8. Miscellaneous items.

(A) Because central banks often think about policy in an interest rate way, here’s an important distinction: Nominal interest rates are not adjusted for inflation. Real interest rates are.

Provided the numbers involved are not too large, the adjustment is extremely simple: The real interest rate is just the nominal interest rate minus the inflation rate. Ex: If the nominal interest rate is 7% and the inflation rate is 4%, then the real interest rate is 3%.

If a central bank is going to think about monetary policy in the (unfortunately roundabout, IMHO) interest rate way, it’s important to make sure that it’s adjusting the real interest rate in the right direction in response to events. Thus it is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains. I mean, it is a truth universally acknowledged that when inflation rises, the nominal interest rate must rise even more, to make sure the real interest rate rises. (This called the Taylor Principle.) Fed policy over the last 8 months or so has not been respecting this principle, which everyone at the Fed is aware of. The reason for this is…?

(B) Fiat money. “Fiat” means force. Fiat money is supported by force because e.g. if you don’t want to pay your taxes in dollars the IRS guys won’t be amused, and legal compulsion will enter the situation. Try to pay your taxes next year in Doritos or fish heads; observe results.

(C) “The Fed’s balance sheet.” When the Fed buys Treasury bonds or other kinds of securities it holds them on its balance sheet. The dollar-denominated reserves that the Fed created to buy those securities are booked as a liability on its balance sheet. (Though they’re not really a liability in any economically meaningful sense.) For this reason, when the Fed creates money, the gross size of its balance sheet grows. The net size doesn’t change, since newly-acquired assets (T bonds or whatever) are matched by an equal amount of newly-created liabilities (electronic reserves). My point being: When finance-y people say “The Fed’s balance sheet has grown” they’re saying, rather obliquely, “The Fed has been printing money.”